


Leave The Rough Road

by blanketed_in_stars



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Community: rs_games, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mental Health Issues, R/S Games 2016, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-11
Updated: 2016-10-11
Packaged: 2018-08-20 04:30:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8236133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blanketed_in_stars/pseuds/blanketed_in_stars
Summary: R/S Games 2016  - Day 7 - Team PlaceBetween the future and the past, between one moon and the next, there is time enough to find the way home.





	

**Author's Note:**

> **Team:** Place  
>  **Title:** Leave The Rough Road  
>  **Rating:** T  
>  **Warnings:** Mental health issues, some light body horror, suicidal thoughts, also (clearly) a fair bit of angst  
>  **Genres:** Angst, Hurt/Comfort  
>  **Word Count:** 7700  
>  **Summary:** Between the future and the past, between one moon and the next, there is time enough to find the way home.  
>  **Notes:** Thanks to my lovely beta who doesn’t use LJ, and without whom I might not have actually posted this! Love you  <3  
>  **Prompt:** #46 - "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." T.S. Eliot

_It would be the same at the end of the journey,_  
If you came at night like a broken king,  
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,  
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road  
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade  
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for  
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning  
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled  
If at all. Either you had no purpose  
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured  
And is altered in fulfilment. 

 

———

 

**July, 1978**

 

The sharp, pale blade of the moon scrapes the floor of the Shack and Remus trembles—Sirius can see him quake. He wants to move closer, to help, but fear keeps him in the corner. He stares at Remus, willing him to meet his eyes and understand how different it feels when James isn’t here, or even Peter. There is only Sirius, and soon, the wolf.

They agreed upon this. Still, Sirius aches watching Remus clench his hands into white-knuckled fists on the edge of the crumbling bed. The muscles of his back ripple black and white. He gasps in a choked breath and then bites down on his own curled-up knee in a silent scream.

“Remus—” Sirius starts, but it’s his convulsive movement forward that makes Remus look up. His gaze is wild, terrified, unrecognizable—but he thrusts forward one rigid hand, palm out in a clear gesture. _Stay away._ All Sirius can think is that Remus in the moonlight is both fearful and fearsome, at once the edge of the map and that which lies just beyond it, while the moment hangs between them like a third beast.

 

**November, 1979**

 

“You can’t keep doing this,” Sirius says.

Remus doesn’t take his eyes from the paper, gnawing on the end of his Muggle pen. “Yes, I can,” he mumbles around the plastic.

He sounds more contrary than defiant, if those two things have ever been separate where cornered animals are concerned. “No,” Sirius insists, “you can’t.” He watches Remus’s eyes move along the tiny lines of text, searching diligently, but not hopefully. “You’re going to end up working as a hit man or something.”

“Mm.” Remus perks up for a moment and leans fractionally closer to the paper, then falls back, a slight furrow in his brow. “Hope so.”

“And you’ll only take the job because they feed you,” Sirius predicts, “and let you sleep somewhere that doesn’t leak in the rain.” He looks around at the tiny room. “You’re going to end up in a gang of street assassins for the health insurance.”

Finally, Remus blinks and looks up. “What are you talking about?” he demands, in a tone that makes it clear he has heard nothing but the very last sentence.

Sirius doesn’t bother repeating himself. “Come live with me,” he says.

A long moment passes during which Remus regards him with an inscrutable expression. Then he looks away, back at the paper, though he isn’t reading it. “I’m not going to join a gang,” he says.

“You never know,” Sirius says. He plays along because even he, the prime example of speaking without thinking, can hardly believe what he’s just said. But—there was a reason, and he finds he can’t ignore it. “I mean it. Come live with me.”

“I reckon Marlene’s in a gang,” Remus muses. He flips the pen over from finger to finger, something he learned to do in the summer after third year. “She’s always over at your place—are you sure you’re not the street assassin here?”

Sirius rolls his eyes to cover up his irritation and hurt at the way Remus is dismissing his very earnest proposal. Then he thinks better of it and lets his lip curl. “You’re going to freeze in here come winter,” he says, “sooner, if the weather keeps on like it has been. And the tap only works half the time on good days—not to mention the bath, I mean, I’m not squeamish but—”

“If you’ve got a point,” Remus says, “get to it.”

Spluttering slightly, Sirius waves a hand at the flat. “Well, if I knock on the door in January to find a Moony-shaped icicle in here, I really will assassinate you.”

“It’s what I’ve got,” Remus says quietly, “it’s what I can afford. It’s mine.”

Sirius snatches the pen from him and meticulously positions it between his own fingers. “I know,” he says, though he doesn’t entirely. It’s one thing to live in a run-down two-room because it’s all you can scrape together, because nobody will hire you, because you happen to sprout fur and fangs once a month; renting one with the inheritance money that you received despite being disowned is quite another. “But—well—mine could be, too.” Then, infuriatingly, he feels himself flush.

Remus, by some miracle, does not see. He is biting his bottom lip and inspecting his fingernails. “That’s a bit much,” he mumbles. “I could catch something.” His tone of affected disinterest has always been his cover for the times when he cares deeply and violently.

Sirius thrills to hear it. He tries to flip the pen and drops it immediately, then tries again and ends up with a dark line of ink across his palm. “You’re not going to catch anything worse than what you’ve already got,” he says, grinning. He flips the pen again.

In the nick of time, Remus whips his hand up to catch it, an inch from his eye. “I don’t know,” he says. There is the beginning of a grin in his voice, too. “Can you catch a complete disregard for logic and physical safety?”

“Oh, baby,” Sirius says, and snickers at the look on Remus’s face, “if you’ve stuck with me this long, you’ve already got it bad.”

 

**March, 1980**

 

Out of the darkness comes a loud thunk, and Sirius clutches the counter as his entire body seizes in alarm. “Sorry, sorry,” Remus whispers from somewhere in the corner behind him.

His heart still sprinting painfully, Sirius gasps, “Merlin’s fucking _cock.”_ When he can breathe again, he turns around. “What are you doing? It’s past midnight.”

A moment passes before Remus responds. “I needed some air.” There’s another pause, and then—“What are _you_ doing?”

“Can’t sleep,” Sirius says. He takes his glass of water and sits on the armchair near Remus’s corner.

“Oh.” Remus sighs. “Bad dreams, or what?”

He refuses to admit that still, nearly four months later, he sees Regulus’s face behind his eyelids. Not his face on the day Sirius was disowned, twisted and unfamiliar: he sees him as he was before the air between them soured. Killed by Voldemort himself—he must have been scared. Sirius sees him five years old and trembling. “Something like that.”

It’s obvious that Remus hears the lie, but he lets it go. “You should try to get back to sleep,” he says. “Didn’t Dumbledore want to talk to you in the morning?”

This is all true, and even a good idea, but Sirius is terrified enough of the dark spots within his head that he resents the suggestion. “What are you even doing down there?” he demands abruptly, because he can hear that Remus is sitting on the floor. He reaches out and flips on the lamp.

Remus grimaces and squints up at Sirius from where he is hunching in dirty, threadbare robes which he certainly does not own. He is also very wet. He bites his lip.

“Er,” Sirius says. The image is so bizarre that it takes a moment for words to re-enter his mind. “You—you needed some _air?”_

After an extremely obvious hesitation, Remus nods.

“Okay,” Sirius says. “Where did those robes come from? Since when do you wear robes, anyway?” he adds, and feels guilty because it’s not Remus’s fault that only Muggles will hire him, but not guilty enough to take the question back.

“They’re mine,” Remus mumbles. It’s hard to tell if he’s lying or just embarrassed.

Sirius suppresses the urge to roll his eyes. “What about all this water?” he asks. “It’s not even raining.”

“Oh, that,” Remus says. “I fell in the Thames.” He must see that Sirius doesn’t believe him, because he says quickly, “That’s true, I swear.”

Which means, of course, that the rest of it was false. Sirius stares at him and knows for the first time in eight years that Remus is lying about something big, something that hurts, something he should not have to hold on his own. Just as before, it cleaves flesh from bone and leaves him aching. “Sure,” Sirius says, and hardly recognizes his voice, “sure, of course.”

“Yeah,” Remus says. He drips in silence for several seconds. “It’s late,” he says, “I’m going to bed.”

“Go ahead,” Sirius tells him. He watches as Remus gets up and shuts himself in his room, hears through the door the muttered spell that dries his clothes. Where was he tonight, without his wand? Why can he only go there in the pitch black? Why must he go two days before the full moon, when Sirius knows he already feels each step like a hammer-fall on his spine? Why, why, why is he keeping it hidden?

He goes back to bed with the questions swirling in his mind and lies awake until the morning, when the wireless announces a werewolf attack in Glasgow, and Remus drops his mug on the floor, and the silence between them thickens to something tangible, something to be choked upon.

 

**June, 1980**

 

Peter leans across the table with wide eyes, and Sirius feels the familiar thrill of foreboding in the pit of his stomach, hot and sick. “What?” he demands. It’s already been a very long night.

“Is there something going on?” Peter asks. “With you and Remus?” His mouth twists awkwardly when Sirius narrows his eyes. “He did have that thing with Benjy—and I thought maybe, since he moved in with you now—”

“We’re flatmates,” Sirius says. He feels himself flush and bites the inside of his cheek, hard. It’s not as if he never entertained the possibility, but only as a late afternoon daydream, and not for years. Certainly not now. “That’s all it is, Pete, I swear.”

For several seconds, Peter scrutinizes him, unblinking. Then he nods. “Good,” he says, and takes a drink of firewhiskey. “Sorry for asking,” he adds, swallowing, “but I just wanted to make sure. You know.”

Sirius does know. He knows very well by now the wrench of his intestines when he hears the door creak on its hinges; the quiet, anxious buzz in his mind when he wakes to find Remus already gone; the quickening of his pulse when he asks a question as simple as _how are you?_ and waits for the answer. He wonders that these were ever things he did not know. “Yeah,” he says.

Perhaps something of his discomfort shows on his face, because Peter looks concerned again. “Everything all right?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Sirius hedges, “I mean, yes, it’s fine, it’s just.” He waves a vague hand. “I’m wondering.”

“Wondering what?” Peter demands, now looking positively alarmed. “You haven’t forgotten—”

“No.” Sirius shakes his head. And it’s true, he hasn’t. He remembers the occasions where the Order was beaten back just a little too handily, where an attack was simply a hair too well-timed to be coincidence. They had all danced around saying it for weeks, months, before Peter finally whispered: _there must be a spy._ And with the absences and the avoidance of questions, Sirius admits it makes sense. Maybe he’s being an idiot, being so reluctant to find hard evidence. Maybe he just doesn’t want to suspect his friend. Either way, his head is starting to hurt.

Peter chews his lip. “All right.” He hesitates. “I’m sorry, mate,” he says again. “I don’t like it any more than you do.”

“Mm,” Sirius agrees. All at once he feels exhausted, and dirty, and as if his skin is alive with insects. “Listen,” he says, putting down his firewhiskey so suddenly that Peter jumps, “I’m gonna head back.”

“I thought you were going to stay the night,” Peter says. He sounds mostly disappointed, but Sirius thinks he hears a modicum of relief.

He understands. Lately all he has wanted is to be alone, and possibly to sleep forever. Of course, there is also the increasingly troubling way that he has wanted simply to talk to Remus, to hear him say that these fears are unfounded and that things will be all right, that they will survive. He tries not to want that. He tries, also, to pull his mind back, once again, to the present. “I should probably be there if Remus comes back,” he mumbles. “See if I can get anything out of him this time.” He suppresses a shudder.

The next few minutes are a sort of prolonged and subliminal lecture on the proper way to accuse one’s flatmate of being a traitor without really saying anything. At last Sirius spins into nothingness and materializes in the deserted alley outside his building. He climbs the seven flights of stairs with trepidation that mounts higher even as he does, and turns the door with fingers that feel clammy on the knob.

“Remus?” he calls. It’s past midnight. He ought to be quiet. Still, he asks again, “Remus, are you there?” Then he goes room by room, until he has checked everywhere and stands over Remus’s narrow mattress, the sheets still drawn up from that meticulous morning routine. “Are you there?” he says one more time, softly now, because he knows: he is alone. Against the bare walls, his question echoes, _are you there? are you there?_ and fades slowly to a dusty silence.

 

**May, 1981**

 

It’s—this is—it’s just _stupid,_ Sirius decides, and kicks the wall hard. Pain spikes all the way up to his knee and he yells with it though it doesn’t merit the noise. Sometimes all he wants to do is scream, and he takes a deep breath to do it again—

“Don’t,” Remus says, infuriatingly soft. Every line of his body is taut with anger, but he speaks barely above a whisper. “Please don’t.”

“I thought you were leaving,” Sirius snaps. “Glutton for punishment, aren’t you?”

Remus looks around the room as if he didn’t Disapparate from it less than two minutes ago. “I went to Dorcas and Marlene’s,” he says.

Sirius snorts. “And they told you to get your arse back here, I expect, and not to come crying to them next time?” He’s getting louder with each word, but he can’t help it; anger makes Remus small and needle-sharp, but it makes Sirius explode.

But Remus doesn’t react. He keeps staring at the furniture like he expects the lamp to start yelling, too. Then he swallows and looks over at Sirius, across the gulf between them. “Marlene’s dead.”

The words do not quite register. That is, Sirius hears them, but somewhere between his ears and his brain they take a wrong turn. “What?”

There is a moment when it seems Remus will say it’s an awful, vindictive joke, but then he picks up a discarded record sleeve and taps his fingers along the edge. He shakes his head and does not say it again.

“What,” Sirius repeats. It’s no longer a question. He patrolled with Marlene two weeks ago. He told her to fuck herself. She smiled like the edge of a knife and pulled his hair. _Why, when all I have to do is smile and Dorcas will do all the work for me?_ Sirius sucks in a breath and falls into the armchair that’s lost half its stuffing. He can relate to the chair—he wraps his arms around his middle to prevent any more from leaking out.

Remus is staring at the album cover, one of the ones he brought from Wales, some Muggles in ridiculous blue smocks spelling gibberish in flag semaphore. His eyes are blank. He puts the record down and Sirius notices that his hands are shaking, the tightness in his frame coming out in the little tremors. He is taking small, hesitant steps around the room.

It feels as if something is congealing between Sirius’s ribs. “How,” he says, takes another breath, and intends to start the question again, but his mouth is so dry that he can only blink.

With his fists clenched, Remus chews on his lip. “I don’t know,” he says. “Dorcas didn’t—didn’t say.”

“Wait,” Sirius says, clinging to the one thing in his mind that isn’t Marlene’s flashing eyes and sparkling laugh. “Wait.” He hears his voice harden again and welcomes the rush of acid. “You left Dorcas alone?”

Because everything is slipping in and out of focus, Sirius sees, very clearly, the minute narrowing of Remus’s eyes—and nothing else. It’s enough to tell him that Remus, too, has got his hackles up again. “No,” he says, biting the word off. “She held a wand to my throat and told me to leave.”

“And you just scampered off like a good boy?” Sirius sneers. His fingers dig into the fabric of the chair as he shoves to his feet. “Never mind that she should _not_ be left alone when she’s like that—”

“What’s the alternative,” Remus hisses, “leave _you_ alone when you’re like _this?”_

“Damn right! You don’t have a problem leaving every other night to do God knows what—”

“Excuse me?” Remus says, hushed and dangerous. He comes one step closer.

“Where do you go?” Sirius yells. Everything inside him is poured suddenly into his voice, which speaks words he knows are not meant for this moment, but it doesn’t matter: out they come anyway. “What are you doing, Remus, you—”

He stops with a ringing in his ears and salt in his mouth. He is back in the chair. It takes a moment for him to realize that Remus has hit him. It takes another moment for him to understand that he has bitten his tongue and that Remus, halfway back across the room now, looks no less livid and not at all sorry.

Sirius swallows the blood and touches his sore face with a faint sense of surprise beneath the anger. “Where do you go?” he asks again. His voice sounds dead to his own ears.

“I can’t tell you,” Remus says, sounding just as hollow. “It’s for the Order, though.”

He looks into Sirius’s eyes, and Sirius is tempted for a fleeting instant to use Occulumency on him and unearth the truth, but he knows that Remus is an even better Occulumens than Sirius is, because he has had to be, because Remus is built on secrets. He knows all this and he feels in the same heartbeat that he scarcely knows Remus at all. “Who’s directing you?” he asks.

Remus doesn’t blink. “I can’t say that, either,” he whispers, a tremble there, though his hands are steady now. “No one can know.” His voice breaks at the end and he looks away.

These are the words of a spy. Sirius watches silently as Remus knots his fingers together with rigidity born of grief or something even worse. He sees, as if from afar, the way they are standing, islands fallen out of an archipelago, two disconnected points on opposite edges of a map.

 

**October, 1981**

 

Sirius feels Remus's eyes on him as he puts his wand in his pocket and pulls on his Muggle jacket, the leather one Lily found for him last Easter. The gaze is a brand so hot he's surprised there are no singe marks on his clothes. But he doesn't turn, doesn't let himself look around.

“Where are you going?” Remus asks when neither of them can pretend that Sirius is doing anything other than leaving.

“What?” Sirius says, sharp, because he's tired, and he doesn't want to lie, and he will anyway, and he doesn’t know if he's projecting his own suspicion into the question, and beneath all of that it's just irritating.

Remus doesn't ask again, but waits, still burning holes in Sirius's back.

Sirius could ignore it now and refuse to answer. “I want to check on James and Lily,” he says. Maybe he wants Remus to catch him in the lie, he doesn't know.

But Remus only says, “Give them my love.”

Something about his voice makes Sirius look round, though he knows this will turn Remus's searing gaze into nothing more than surreptitious glances out of the corner of his eyes. Watching him not-watch, Sirius's heart gives a painful throb. _It's not true,_ he wants to say, wants to burst out, _really I'm only going to make sure Peter's all right,_ wants Remus to look at his face for the first time in a month and a half. It frightens him how much he wants it. He knows, he _knows_ that he must say nothing, but with Remus unlike any other the secrets come pressing behind his lips and clamor to be spoken.

He swallows them down.

“Sure,” he says.

“And tell Harry ‘Happy Halloween,’” Remus adds with a burst of something desperate that doesn’t make it into his voice but is evident in the press of his palm to the table.

Sirius nods. He opens his mouth to say something unwise, then twists his hand on the doorknob and goes out. On the landing outside the flat he waits for nearly a minute, in case Remus decides to demand the truth, before bumping heavy down the stairs, out of the building, and around the corner, where he Disapparates in a whirl of bitter wind.

 

———

 

_See, now they vanish,_  
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,  
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern. 

 

———

 

**June, 1994**

 

Buckbeak lands in a great flurry of beating wings. Sirius walks around to his head and stays there a moment, feeling the feathers and beak and the sweep of those immense lungs. Orange eyes stare unblinking into his own. "Hungry?" Buckbeak chirrups affirmatively. "I'll get you something," Sirius murmurs, and turns toward the house.

It's empty, and feels that way, not as if no one lives here, but as if this is the space within which someone has unraveled themselves. Un-lived in. Still, Sirius knows, with a kind of muscle memory that translates even to this unfamiliar place, which room will be the kitchen. He follows the instinct down the hall, but stops short at the second door he passes. It is barely cracked, but in the dim light that seeps in, he sees a tiled floor, the scar where a toilet must once have been, bare walls devoid of decoration, a naked bulb glinting near the ceiling. He presses a curious hand against the wood of the door—

“Christ.” The sound of a breath sucked into unprepared lungs. Sirius turns and Remus is there in the hall behind him, being slowly swallowed by a large jumper, one hand braced on the wall, eyes wide. “I—Merlin, Sirius.” Another breath. Then he moves forward and folds Sirius to him, though there’s not much to fold or be folded into; most of it is jumper. “Couldn’t have owled ahead, could you?”

Sirius puts his hands where he knows they are supposed to go and holds them there a moment. “I had other things to worry about.”

Remus snorts into his neck and steps back. “You broke into my house,” he says.

Blinking down and away, Sirius tries on a lightly injured tone, hopes it fits right after so long. “You didn’t even lock the door.”

At that, Remus smiles. “No,” he agrees, “I didn’t.”

A thousand responses spring to mind, chief among them _why the hell not?_ followed closely by _I’m not worth that_ and _thank you._ But Sirius finds that his lungs feel too heavy, and his throat too tight, to say any of them. He settles for nodding and taking a breath, in, in, in. He reaches out, finds Remus’s hand, nearly lost in the worn knit of the jumper, and holds it fast.

 

———

 

Fingers before him, pale and long, bone-like as they extend. Tendons stretch and the raw tips smart against the wood of the table. It is strange. It is achingly familiar. Sirius hears footsteps pause in the doorway.

“I didn't know you were awake,” Remus says, and sits beside him.

Sirius feels the distance between their bodies and thinks of how to close it, the thread of a conversation long since lost. The words lie limp in his dusty mouth. He pulls back his hand and curls his fingers so that the knuckles ache a frail orogeny in his lap. Parts his lips. The dust escapes.

“So,” Remus says. He glances from Sirius to his tea, and back again. “Where have you been?”

Sirius blinks.

“I mean.” Now Remus looks embarrassed, with color in his cheeks and one hand twisting around his mug. “Not—not Azkaban. I mean since the Shack.”

It doesn’t really make the question any easier. “I don’t,” Sirius begins, and stops to remember what he wants to say. “It’s hard.”

Remus takes another peek at him from under his eyelashes. “To remember?”

Sirius shakes his head, even though it is. He hasn’t been able to remember for thirteen years; that’s old news. This is something else.

“It’s… hard to talk about it?”

“Talking,” Sirius sighs, “is hard.”

Although he nods, Remus still looks uncertain. After a minute, he says, “In the Shack you seemed—okay.”

“Peter,” Sirius says.

It’s Remus’s turn to blink. “What about him?”

Sirius wants to say _Peter_ again—it’s really the only important thing about any of this—but he doesn’t think Remus really listened the first time. If he had, he would have heard the anger in Sirius’s voice, his resolution, his intent to search until he finds the rat. When he thinks of that, his heart burns in his chest and he is fiercely, ravenously glad to be free. And when Peter was there, in the room, Sirius’s head was clear. How can he explain that now he is tempest-swept, lost?

The silence stretches. “It doesn’t matter,” Remus says at last.

It does. “Okay,” Sirius tells him, because he doesn’t know what else there is to say.

Remus must see in his face that he is lying. “Really,” he presses, “it’s all right.” He lets go of his tea and lays his hands open on table, palms up.

Sirius reaches out without knowing exactly why and clutches at Remus’s hands, tight enough that he thinks it must hurt, in the small part of his brain that still cares about that. He wants to say—he wants—

“We’ll find him,” Remus says, so softly, “and we’ll kill him.” There is no menace in his voice, only a quiet and iron assurance. In his eyes, there is understanding.

 

———

 

There is a question on tiptoe in Sirius’s mouth, and he moves his tongue around it, afraid to ask. Like standing on the edge of a cliff, he thinks, in some far-away, uncharted place: yet unexplored.

He swallows, and asks. “What is that empty room for?”

Remus doesn’t freeze or drop the scissors or even hesitate, but his voice holds steely caution as he says, “What room?”

“The one in the hall,” Sirius says. He nods in its general direction, though it’s invisible from the kitchen, then catches himself and holds still. “Sorry.” He watches Remus in the mirror. His lips are pressed together in apparent annoyance at Sirius’s movement, but recognition flickers dim in Sirius’s mind that there is also something more.

“Oh,” Remus says, “that room.” He starts in with the scissors again, making tiny, premeditated clips. “It’s just empty. I don’t have anything to put in it.”

“But—” Sirius thinks back. “It used to be a bathroom. You ripped the toilet out, I saw where it was on the floor.” He catches his breath, watching as Remus blinks, both of them just as surprised at the sudden outpouring of words.

Remus glances away, toward the door. Looking for an escape route. “I didn’t need the toilet,” he says.

“Or the shower?” Sirius presses. “There’s a spot on the wall where the pipe was. You don’t have one in the water closet, either.”

There’s a moment where Remus gives him a frustrated look and says, “That’s what magic is for,” with such flat irritation that Sirius almost believes him. Then he sees again, with a kind of painful sharpness, the minute tightening of Remus’s mouth, and also this time his knuckles around the handle of the shears. The yellow hall light glints dull in their eyes. “Oh,” Sirius says.

Remus swallows and looks away again. “Don’t,” he says, “it’s not what you think—”

Sirius feels struck dumb, cut off, lungless. He almost looks around to make sure there’s no dementor to suck away all the air, but can’t quite bring himself to do anything other than stare, horrified, at nothing. He fights for words. “You said—the potion—that it helped.”

“It does,” Remus rushes. “I haven’t hurt anyone. I _won’t.”_ He sounds, Sirius thinks, like he’s convincing himself more than anyone else, and he also sounds like it isn’t working. “It’s fine,” Remus says. Even he winces a little at how flat it falls.

It’s been long enough that Sirius no longer remembers many things—the taste of treacle tart, the sound of Lily Potter’s laugh, the exact shade of crimson that hung around his four-poster bed—but he doesn’t think he will ever forget the monstrous, flat-bottomed horror that he now feels for the fourth time in his life. Even if he goes back to Azkaban, even if the dementors take his soul and his tattered heart, he can’t imagine anything taking this away. “You’re trying to be alone,” Sirius says, and his voice sounds rough in his own ears, “but you’re there—you’re not an animal. I could help.”

His lips pressed tight together, Remus puts down the scissors. “I don’t need you to help.”

“I know,” Sirius says. He does. “I _want_ to.” He tries to meet Remus’s eyes in the mirror, but Remus is now staring at the backsplash over the sink, exploring the tiles with utter concentration. “Why?” Sirius demands.

Once again, Remus’s gaze flickers to him and away. The hard line of his mouth wavers. “What if it doesn’t work?” he says softly. “What if I hurt someone?”

“You live in the middle of nowhere,” Sirius says, “you won’t—”

“But _what if I do?”_ Remus hisses. “It’s unthinkable, Sirius, I could—” He breaks off and seems to be fighting with all the words he wants to say.

Once, Sirius could have taken advantage of his silence, said the right thing in order to make it better. But now he has reached the end of the track. There is a way to fix it, he knows, but he can’t quite find it anymore. “I,” he says. Nothing else comes out.

“See?” Remus says. The bitterness in his voice is awful to hear. “It’s too much of a risk. I know you agree.”

Sirius is frozen. He can’t shake his head. He can’t—he can _almost_ —remember the way to overcome this total alarm. And although he feels an overwhelming sense that he must do _something,_ he can do nothing but breathe, while behind him, Remus walls himself in, shuts a door between them.

 

———

 

Sirius wakes from a whirl of salt spray and dread, and he stumbles through the house until he finds the bedroom—the halls seem different in the dark—and sits on one edge of the bed. The room smells sweet, like the night air: a window is open. His eyes are already adjusted to the black, so he can see how Remus is twisted in the sheets and how his hands grasp empty and tense for something unfound.

When Sirius touches him, Remus catapults into wakefulness, but not consciousness—he throws Sirius down and holds him there with what must be all of his strength. In his eyes, Sirius sees the same terror that he felt in his own dream, that he feels again now as he struggles to breathe with Remus’s hand around his throat. “No,” Remus gasps, _“no—”_ and suddenly his wand is pointed at Sirius’s face.

Fighting for air, Sirius does the only thing he can and swings his arm up to hit Remus in the head. There’s little force behind the blow, but it works: Remus’s face goes slack and he loosens his grip. Sirius pries his hand away, sits up, and breathes.

Beside him Remus is breathing, too, and after a moment he says, in a cracked and battered voice, “I forgot you didn’t kill them.”

Sometimes Sirius forgets too. Sometimes he wishes he were back on the rocks, or that he had drowned on the long swim to shore, or that Peter had got it over with all those years ago and simply killed him in the street. He can’t speak.

“Did I hurt you?” Remus asks, but he doesn’t sound anxious. He sounds bitter and dry and as if he wishes he had. When he looks at Sirius, there is in his eyes a fourteen-year-old agony long since rotten.

Sirius shakes his head, though his throat is sore.

Remus nods. “Good.” His hand twitches on the bed, then lies still.

Through the open window comes a summer breeze and the sound of crickets. Sirius shifts. “I’m sorry I didn’t see Peter,” he says. “What he was, I mean.”

An owl hoots outside while Remus stays silent. “Me too,” he says at last. He speaks again after another moment, and now his voice is not quite so harsh. “I used to hate you,” he murmurs. “I hated you so much that I wonder if I always will, just a little.”

What makes it hardest, thinks Sirius, is that there is no way to separate the past, the way they were, from what is now before them. There is even another war coming—everyone says so. And what if Remus always does hate him, just a little? Who could blame him for being hurt so deeply that the pain wound itself to his very bones and festered there?

Then Remus says, “I hated myself, too.”

Sirius scrapes his throat raw to ask, “Why?”

“Because,” Remus says, “I hated you, but I could never manage not to miss you.” In the shadows he smiles, soft, no longer bitter at all.

 

**July, 1994**

 

Like a man lost at sea, Remus stands adrift in the dingy little sitting room, feet from Sirius, feet from anything. He looks haggard, but his fingers twitch with an energy that belies the tired slump of his spine. “You don't have to,” Remus says quietly, somewhere between pride and regret. “I told you. Severus makes a potion for me now. I don't need—it’s not so bad anymore.”

Sirius has listened to him say the last bit for years, for moons beyond count, and he still knows the lie when he hears it. He shakes his head. “I don't trust anything Snivellus makes,” he says. “He could be poisoning you.”

It's a weak argument, and Remus treats it as such. He twists his mouth and turns his head to the side, looking across at the bookshelf and the tattered volumes it holds.

Sirius tries again. “Not being so bad anymore doesn't make it good.” That's much better, and from the half-second's glance Remus flickers in his direction, Sirius knows he's hit the mark. He wants to smile encouragingly but can't muster the necessary brightness. He taps his fingers together and hopes the message gets across anyhow.

Remus takes a breath. He lets it out and presses his lips into a thin line. “It's not safe.”

“Either it's better than before or it's not,” Sirius says. “You can't have both.”

“It's not safe for you to stay here.” Remus’s voice is carefully flat. “You’re an escaped convict.”

There’s a feeling in Sirius’s chest akin to how he imagines it would be to have his heart carved out with a spoon. He stares at Remus, willing him to meet his eyes.

With a pained expression, Remus does. “You can’t stay,” he says, still in the same neutral tone.

“I can’t run.” It sounds a lot like pleading to Sirius’s ears, but he truly doesn’t think he could bear to put his paws to the road with Remus behind him once again.

“Sirius—” Remus lets out a sharp breath. “Severus told them I was there in the Shack. What if the Ministry comes looking for you here?”

On the verge of replying, Sirius pauses, his mouth half-open. If the Ministry knocks on this door, they will find a disgraced, dangerous werewolf harboring an even more dangerous fugitive. “I can’t run,” he says again, but this time it doesn’t sound anything like pleading; it sounds like defeat.

Remus shakes his head. He makes a motion as if to run a hand through his hair, then just presses his fingers against his mouth, blocking whatever it is he is almost saying. “I’m sorry,” he says at last. “But I mean it. You _can’t.”_ And he’s not looking at Sirius anymore, either. He has fixed a firm gaze on the books again.

Sirius blinks. “Right,” he says, a wild edge to his voice, because he wants to throw things and scream and break his own legs and maybe weep. “Right, well, then, I’ll just—” and he makes to leave the room.

In a sudden, swift movement, Remus stays him with fingers wrapped around his wrist. They meet and overlap. All at once, he looks storm-tossed. “Come back,” he says, raw beneath the words like a current that drags at depth.

“Won’t be very hard,” Sirius quips, raising his eyebrows in a pointed glance at their joined arms. “I haven’t even left yet.”

Remus makes a noise like a groan that just barely escapes being an intelligible word. “You need to go, but I—you need to come back.” He doesn’t relax his grip.

Sirius is glad. He prefers this to the lonesome points they made in the room before, unconnected, a coloring book waiting to be filled in. “You’re still telling me to get out of here,” he checks. The hard bitterness under his tongue wars with something sweet blooming behind his ribs.

“Yes,” Remus exhales. He lets go at last, with his eyes still holding Sirius tight. “But I’m telling you not to go far.”

 

**August, 1994**

 

When Sirius slips off of Buckbeak’s back, the moonless night is full of stars, and each blade of grass looks sharp as it reaches for the pinpricks high above. He stands there a moment just to feel the darkness on his skin.

He starts violently at the loud click of the back door as it shuts—the only sound in the otherwise still summer air. “Sorry,” Remus says softly. He has a jumper on over what looks to be threadbare old clothes turned to pajamas, and although the night is not cold, Sirius shivers. “It’s too nice to stay inside,” Remus says in response to Sirius’s too-long stare, and gestures up at the sky.

“Nice,” Sirius repeats. Buckbeak chirrups behind him as if in agreement. “In Azkaban—” Remus stiffens beside him, and Sirius tries not to notice. “In Azkaban, it was always cloudy. Dementors do that.” He gazes upward and finds his namesake. “When I was swimming back to land, I saw them, the stars—first time in years.”

Remus lets out a slow breath. “That must have been,” he murmurs, and stops, and Sirius can tell he’s imagining it—discovering that no word is quite enough.

“That’s how I feel all the time,” Sirius tells him, “everything rushing back all at once. And it’s amazing but it’s also too bright, and I don’t know how to look at the world anymore.”

For a while, Remus is silent, until Sirius almost thinks he’s decided it’s easier to ignore the whole problem than come up with a response. Then he says, “I don’t know how that is. But have you tried taking it one star at a time?”

Sirius turns to look at him in confusion and sees that Remus is watching him with clear, pale-speckled eyes. “What?”

Remus lifts one arm heavenward and points to where Sirius winks against the black, brighter than the others. “Pick one and start from there. Build up around it.” He glances up at the star, then back at Sirius, the real Sirius, with a small smile. “That’s the one I’d use.”

It sets the tips of Sirius’s fingers to tingling: the thrill of homecoming, of steady skies, of knowing at last where exactly he stands.

 

———

 

Remus looks around as the door creaks open. “I don’t want,” he begins.

“I know,” Sirius says. “I don’t care.” He tosses the blanket at Remus and sits against the opposite wall; the room is so tiny that they their knees, folded against their respective chests, almost touch, and so dark that if they were any farther apart they might think they were alone.

With a sigh, Remus covers himself. “This is ridiculous.” When Sirius doesn’t dignify that with a response, he says, “You don’t need to.”

“We’ve had this conversation before,” Sirius reminds him.

“Well,” Remus says, and gives him a look that is probably supposed to be irritated. “I don’t actually need anyone anymore.”

Sirius knows that Remus only means that he no longer rips himself to shreds every time the moon is full, but he feels a deep hurt that Remus doesn’t see it: the tatters of his life here in this tiny cottage, alone, the roughness of his road. In any case, that’s beside the point. “Has it ever occurred to you,” he says, “that I might be here for me?”

A long moment expands between them while Remus blinks at the tiled floor, the bare bulb, the air half a foot above Sirius’s head. Finally, he asks, “What do you mean?”

“I’m here,” Sirius says, “because—you help.” He can tell that Remus doesn’t get it, doesn’t understand that only here do his thoughts align themselves into any kind of order. So he tries, with this strange, long-lost clarity, to explain. “You make things better. In my head.”

Now Remus sounds skeptical. “How?”

“Merlin,” Sirius mutters, because that’s like asking how the sun stays up in the sky. He doesn’t know how, he can’t explain, but he feels it. Like wind, like hope, like currents, like a compass in his hand. “You just do,” he says. “When I’m here, nothing goes missing.” He watches Remus pick feverishly at his blanket and reaches out to take his hand, holds it still.

For many, many moon-heavy seconds, Remus simply looks at their hands: the joining of their fingers, the sharp ridges of their knuckles. Then he looks up at Sirius with his eyes mere glints in the darkness of the room. “What do you mean, when you’re here?” he asks. “You like this place that much?” His voice is clearly meant to be teasing, but the way he trips over the syllables only makes him sound bitter.

“I don’t care,” Sirius says for the second time. “It’s only”— _oh_ —“it’s only a house.” He stops, breathless with the truth of it. “I’ll go anywhere as long as you’re there.” He knows it, as he’s never known anything else, feels it in the meat of his heart. Sirius has been following Remus since he was eleven years old and he’s wandered farther than he ever thought he would, but he’s come back. Nothing will make him leave again.

In the utter silence, Remus’s breathing is uneven, as cratered and dry as the moon above. “I don’t know what you’re saying,” he says at last, and Sirius hears the cracks in his voice, the beginning of the change that will come.

How perfectly broken they are. “Does it need to be said?”

Remus nods, but leans forward without waiting to hear it, cups a trembling, rough-edged hand around the back of Sirius’s neck, and draws him in. They rest temple to temple and Sirius with his mouth beside Remus’s ear places the words carefully on the tip of his own tongue. “I love you,” he whispers.

“Oh,” Remus breathes, and turns his head, and kisses Sirius with a wild, hungry mouth. He must know that Sirius is only approximately glued together into the shape of himself, but he doesn’t kiss him as if he’s in danger of breaking.

 

**September, 1994**

 

The moonlight slices in through the strip beneath the door in the little Yorkshire cottage and Remus trembles. Sirius feels him at every point of contact, where his fingers twist in Sirius’s hair and his forehead presses to Sirius’s shoulder and his breath, sharp, ghosts over Sirius’s arm, two beasts, two shattering men. Every second pulses through both of them as Remus tightens his grip and winds himself more closely. His spine arches and each vertebra thrusts out, strains against the skin.

In the last frantic seconds before Remus will shove him away, Sirius wonders about the shape they make here on the floor in the near dark. They are curled so intricately that he can’t imagine they look like anything other than a single creature. Not yet monstrous. Rather—he hears the harsh staccato gasping and thumbs as comfortingly as he can at the hollow of Remus’s jaw—rather, they must appear vulnerable, and, with the pale glow on kneecaps and shoulder blades and teeth bared in a grimace, not quite lengthening, even, somehow, beautiful.

 

———

 

_We shall not cease from exploration_  
And the end of all our exploring  
Will be to arrive where we started  
And know the place for the first time.  
Through the unknown, unremembered gate  
When the last of earth left to discover  
Is that which was the beginning;  
At the source of the longest river  
The voice of the hidden waterfall  
And the children in the apple-tree 

_Not known, because not looked for_  
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness  
Between two waves of the sea. 

— _Little Gidding_ by TS Eliot


End file.
